‘Hotel Cartagena’ by Simone Buchholz | @ohneKlippo @OrendaBooks @FWDTranslations @RandomTTours | #blogtour #extract

Welcome to the final day of the blog tour for Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz! I have an extract to share with you all today but first, here is what this fourth instalment in the Chastity Riley series is all about.

Author : Simone Buchholz
Title : Hotel Cartagena
Series : Chastity Riley #4
Pages : 276
Publisher : Orenda Books
Publication date : March 4, 2020

| ABOUT THE BOOK |

Twenty floors above the shimmering lights of the Hamburg docks, public prosecutor Chastity Riley is celebrating a birthday with friends in a hotel bar when 12 heavily armed men pull out guns and take everyone hostage. Among the hostages is Konrad Hoogsmart, the hotel owner, who is being targeted by a man whose life – and family – have been destroyed by Hoogsmart’s actions. 

With the police looking on from outside – their colleagues’ lives at stake – and Chastity on the inside, increasingly ill from sepsis, the stage is set for a dramatic confrontation and a devastating outcome for the team…all live streamed in a terrifying bid for revenge. 

| EXTRACT |

St Pauli, summer 1984 

Henning stood at the harbour, the night having just shattered on him. The light and the Elbe were creeping up from the east, they almost sank into the sounds that the morning sent through the city, and that would have been fine by Henning too, just sinking somewhere. 

He looked at the water and watched the ships leaving, the warm wind tickled the back of his neck, he had his hands in his trouser pockets, he was hungry. He still had a little change on him, but it wasn’t even enough for a fish roll. 

He had spent all his money on the girl. 

Elisabeth or whatever her name was. 

He’d met her in the Markthalle, at the Black Flag concert he’d been looking forward to for weeks. When she’d given him a kind of sideways smile, he’d had a few seconds when he didn’t know who he had a bigger crush on, Henry Rollins or her. Then they danced, she was wild and laughed, and that flooded his bloodstream with happiness; after the concert, with all the loud music in his bones, he invited her back to St Pauli; she was kind of scared to come at first, but he talked her three friends round and they all went off to the Kiez together. 

They went on foot; it was warm after all. 

He’d taken the ladies to the Lehmitz, that run-down dive with the tiny, run-down roof terrace over the back yard, where only a chain-link fence separated the people from the sky. Nobody knew exactly why the fence had been put up. Maybe to stop the drunks – there were plenty of them in the Lehmitz – from just jumping into the night. 

They’d stood tightly packed under the chicken wire. Henning had handed out vodka shots, one after another, in between they’d drunk beer, the girls had paid for the beer. There wasn’t necessarily romance in the air, but Henning had put his arm around Elisabeth, or whatever her name was, and when she laughed she kept letting herself sort of fall into him, into his arm, she leant against him with a storm in her hips, her bottom was then on his upper thigh, and so he came closer and closer to her. 

Did the two of them want to go somewhere else, he asked her quietly. She looked at him and nodded, and he’d almost have kissed her right there, but he didn’t dare in front of her friends. They were ladies from the Alster, you could see that in the clothes they were wearing, they had sharp tongues on them, you had to watch out not to get snagged on a barbed remark.

OK, come on, she said half an hour later, when the friends wanted to go home, and so Henning and Elisabeth or whatever her name was snuck away unnoticed. 

He took her hand when they turned into Davidstrasse and they stopped for a moment up on the corner, with a view of the harbour, and she said: ‘It’s always beautiful, that old place.’ ‘You’re beautiful,’ said Henning, and she laughed again, and then she gave him a quick kiss and pulled him on. 

Damn, he’d missed the moment.

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Oh, dear. If you want to know what happened between Henning and the girl who may or may not have been called Elizabeth back in the summer of 1984 and how it pertains to the present day, then why not grab yourself a copy of Hotel Cartagena from the following links or your local bookshop as they need your support more than ever.

Amazon UK | Bookshop UK | Hive UK | Kobo | Waterstones

| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |

Simone Buchholz was born in Hanau in 1972.

At university, she studied Philosophy and Literature, worked as a waitress and a columnist, and trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg.

In 2016, Simone Buchholz was awarded the Crime Cologne Award as well as runner-up in the German Crime Fiction Prize for Blue Night, which was number one on the KrimiZEIT Best of Crime List for months.

She lives in Sankt Pauli, in the heart of Hamburg, with her husband and son.